Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (12 page)

Life was passing her by, and she was condemned to endless, boring days and evenings, manufacturing smiles at Elsinore. She was desperate to throw it all in and jump ship, but until there was some sign of another vessel, she couldn't do it.

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He walks forward. The path enters the trees, but they are not quite as he remembers. They are sparser, for one thing, and they are mangy, half their leaves fallen and the remainder thin and limp. He can see both the sky and the lights of the city between them. It is a slight disappointment.

The path descends again, briefly, then climbs on, passing an empty bench on one side and a circle of them surrounding a tree on the other. There is another copse ahead, and this is the one he remembers; the one he has been expecting. It has more trees, closer together, and there is rough grass and undergrowth between them. There is a little dirt path as well, worn by the feet of walkers, which branches off to the left. He nearly always takes this one. It passes the remains of a painted cast-iron fence, long since fallen and partly submerged in weeds, which always has him wondering what it is doing there. Presumably all this was farmland once, commonage, perhaps. He always means to find out about the history of the heath, but as soon as he leaves it, he always forgets.

When the little path comes into view he hesitates. It leads into a deeper darkness and he can't see far along it. He suspects it is safer to stay on the tarmac, but he can't be sure, because that it presumably what the hoodlums will all be expecting. He laughs; surprises himself with the sound. If it's safety he's concerned about, what is he doing out here in the middle of the night? And where did that word appear from? Hoodlums. Or should it be hoodli? Hoodla?

It is raining again, but not heavily like before. It is a kind of rain that isn't common in London, so light that it's not much more than mist. It permeates clothes gradually but doesn't drench them. It doesn't send rivers down the neck, but gathers quietly in the hair and rolls down the face in warm drops, like tears. At home in Tipperary his neighbours would call it, or the day that brought it, ‘soft'. It is Irish weather for an Irishman's journey.

He sets foot upon the path and experiences an immediate sense of rightness, or righteousness, or of something bordering on elation. This is it. This is the way. This path will help him to solve the riddle that so disturbs him. It is the soul's way home, to that lost place within him where integrity and poetry linger in chains like an imprisoned princess.

The path, so ordinary by day, is numinous by night. It is the realm of Hermes and Athene, of Pan and the púca. Above all, it is the tramping ground of Fionn and the Fianna, hunting their magical prey through the forest. This very hill might break open and reveal the golden halls of the sidhe, forever alive within it. A gentle, intermittent wind breathes among the branches. The dying leaves seethe, fall silent, seethe again. The sound is like lazy breakers on a calm shore. The name of the land he is in flits across his mind and is gone before he can catch it. But it is significant. He pauses to concentrate, to summon it back. There is the slightest of sounds behind him; the briefest rubbing-together of two hands, or the quick scratch of a soft brush on the hearth. There is barely time for him to become aware of it. There is no time at all for him to turn and look.

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She gave up on her search for a better life and began to sleep more, going to bed when she came in from work instead of sitting up half the night in front of the computer. On some mornings she was amazed to find him waking her with coffee, instead of the other way round, and he was ridiculously pleased about it, as though she was a stubborn adversary who had finally conceded his point. But it frightened her. She believed that sleeping was a sign of illness or depression, that her body was betraying her and practising for that other, longer sleep. He told her she was being melodramatic, and that she had thirty years of lost sleep to catch up on. Her analyst agreed with him and told her to go with it, and to keep a close eye out for dreams.

She did have some, waking sometimes with a sense of urgency because something was going on that she needed to witness and record, but on those occasions when she could identify some strand of a dream, she was always convinced that it was meaningless, and was embarrassed to write it down. Then, one morning when he was away at a festival in Berlin, she had a dream so vivid and frightening that it woke her. She had killed several people and concealed them in her wardrobe, but it was impossible that they could stay hidden, and the police were at the door. The dream was so vivid that it took her a moment or two to realise that it wasn't actually happening, and the relief, when it came, was enormous. Still she didn't write it down, but she didn't forget it either. When she came home she opened her wardrobe, which was a vast affair, built along an entire wall of her bedroom. There were indeed corpses in there. The clothes were a clear reflection of the state of her life over the years she had worn them. There was nothing wrong with them, except that they were no longer her. She didn't know who it was that she had become, but she knew these clothes no longer represented her.

She ran her fingers along the tightly packed hangers and began, tentatively, to pick out some she no longer wore. Initially it was painful, facing the prospect of parting with them. They were like old selves, with their own particular history and memories. But the further she went, the easier it became, until, suddenly, a landslip occurred in her head. The careful thinning became a virtual clear-fell. The hangers rattled in the vacated space, a sound she hadn't heard since she first moved into the house. The bed disappeared beneath the growing heaps of discards. She moved on to the coats next, and then to the racks and drawers and shelves built in to the right-hand section. New heaps appeared on the floor, of bags and shoes and boots and belts and scarves.

An extraordinary energy flooded through her, mind, body and soul. She pulled her suitcases down from the top shelves, and when they were all stuffed full she pulled his down and filled them as well. There were still mountains of clothes and accessories out on the bed and floor. She sensed her nerve beginning to fail, and she ran downstairs for a roll of dustbin liners and stuffed everything into them, before she could change her mind.

When all the discards were safely out of sight, she looked carefully through the yard or so of remaining garments, huddled nervously in the left-hand corner. Each one got a measured inspection, but the one she lingered over longest was the little black skirt. It ought to go. It made her uneasy and belonged to a phase she wanted to leave behind. But she was afraid that she still needed it, or that he would miss it, and read a meaning into its absence that she didn't intend. Or perhaps, a meaning that she did.

She dreamed that she had been robbed by a mysterious older woman. In the morning, she booked a taxi while she drank her coffee. It came at ten, one of those large ones with a sliding door. The driver helped her to load up and took her to the Sue Ryder shop a few streets away. He helped her unload as well, and she tipped him a tenner. He was delighted, but she got the impression that the volunteers in the shop were not so pleased.

‘It's all designer stuff,' she told them. ‘It has all been dry-cleaned.'

They looked slightly less beleaguered when they heard this, and one of them said, ‘It's very good of you. Thank you.'

She hung around for a couple of beats, expecting some- thing else to happen, some act of closure or finality. There was none. She shrugged and smiled, slightly embarrassed, and left the shop. But as soon as she was on the street she realised she had forgotten about the suitcases, which she didn't intend to give away. She apologised and the same assistant, slightly disdainful, asked her if she'd like to come back for them or wait while they unpacked them, there and then. She knew how hard it would be to find the time to come back, so she said she'd wait, and while the volunteers rummaged around in the back room she wandered idly through the shop.

On the bric-a-brac shelves a small jug caught her eye. It was beautifully shaped with a delicate spout and a lovely round swell of belly. The glaze was a deep, rich, natural green. It didn't fit with anything in her kitchen, which was nouveau-minimalist – all black and white and stainless steel – but she couldn't quite bring herself to put it down, so she kept it in her hand as she moved on round the shop. There were shelves full of videos and a few DVDs, all cheaper than the cost of renting one. She picked out a couple that she thought he might like and tucked them under her arm.

The assistant returned with two of the cases. She looked a lot less disdainful now.

‘Won't keep you much longer,' she said, returning to the back room.

There was nothing left to look at now except for the racks and bins of clothes, so she began, almost despite herself, to browse through them. Just out of curiosity, that was all. There was something mildly distasteful about touching things that strangers had worn, and the smell in the place was of an unspecific but distinctly human origin which the air-fresheners failed to disguise. But as she looked she began to forget about it, and became fascinated by the kinds of things that other people bought, presumably wore, and then passed on. Most of the clothes were hideous, but there were some interesting things among the trash. A white granddad shirt in some ultra-soft fabric, maybe cotton mixed with silk. A pair of straight black jeans, hardly worn, which looked well made. She had both these things in her hand when the assistant came out with another empty suitcase.

‘Changing room is just there if you want to try anything on,' she said.

‘Oh, no,' she said, thrusting the jeans back onto the rail as if they were toxic waste. She had no intention of wearing someone else's cast-offs. But when the volunteer disappeared again she found her attention returning to the jeans. Where was the harm in trying them on? She wasn't going to catch anything from them, and they might give her some clues about the new style she was looking for and how she might replace some of the things she had just brought in. The jeans, it turned out, fitted perfectly, and as she was inspecting herself in front of the mirror the woman came back again.

‘They're perfect on you,' she said. ‘You can have them if you want. The stuff you brought in is brilliant. It'll make a lot of money for us.'

‘No, no,' she said again, but she knew, even then, that she was protesting too much.

‘Where did it all come from, anyway?' the assistant asked. ‘Has someone died?'

‘No,' she said. ‘It's all mine. I'm just having a clear-out. Nobody died.'

But it occurred to her that maybe she was wrong. Some- body had died, suffocated by Elsinore. And somebody else, a new and unknown being, was in the process of being born.

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She left the Sue Ryder shop with the black jeans, the granddad shirt and a dusty-blue raw silk jacket with a Nehru collar. She put all the clothes on when she got home and liked what she saw in the mirror, and became aware again of that sense of energy released. At last, for no reason that she could see, her life was unstuck and moving again. Where to she didn't know, but for the moment at least she would keep going with the flow and see where she would wash up.

He was still in Berlin. The next morning she phoned No Riffraff and put the new maître d' in charge. As soon as the shops opened she dropped the Sue Ryder clothes into the drycleaner's and, with a soaring sense of liberation, set out to trawl through every charity shop between Upper Street and Seven Sisters Road. She didn't go nuts – she walked out of most of them empty-handed – but she did collect a few more things, and she exchanged them with the first lot in the drycleaner's on her way home. Back at the house she pottered around, restless and excited. She was used to having energy like this but not at all used to having nowhere to channel it. She checked in with the staff in Elsinore, then phoned an old friend and told her what she had done.

‘It's feng shui,' the friend said. ‘It's a guaranteed way to change your life and get out of a rut. You just wait and see what happens. You'll be amazed.'

She didn't believe a word of it, but her friend turned out to be right. Tectonic plates were shifting. She had seen nothing yet.

She had an appointment with her hairdresser on her way to work that afternoon. For years he had been trying to persuade her to cut it short and spiky and, still possessed by the changes sweeping through her life, she allowed him to do it. She was thrilled by the way it looked, and left work as soon as high tea was over, so as to be there when he arrived home from Berlin. She put on the granddad shirt and a short Bulgarian waistcoat, and some heavy black trousers in hemp or coarse cotton that she had not had dry-cleaned because it was clear they had never been worn. She was afraid that he would be dismissive and pull the rug out from under her feet, but he didn't. He held her at arms-length and looked her up and down and said, ‘Hmm. That old Ralph Lauren trash again, isn't it?'

But she could tell he liked the new look. When he went upstairs to take a shower she told him to look in the wardrobe. He came haring back down and burst in upon her, clutching his head in both hands and saying, ‘She's left me! What am I going to do? She's taken everything and left me!'

She laughed and he took her in a great bear hug and lifted her off her feet.

‘Why?' she said. ‘What are you so pleased about? Why should it matter so much?'

She asked him because she really didn't know, and she wanted to. He put her down and rubbed at her spiky hair and grinned. ‘I have absolutely no idea,' he said.

But it was important. It was a thing of huge significance. That night they both discovered a new depth of passion for each other, and the little black skirt hung, unused and unwanted, in all that new, dark emptiness.